from Bayo

Once, we supposed that by burrowing into the world, and taking things apart, we would eventually arrive at pure essences, at unbequeathed virgins hidden behind thick layered harems of dust, grime and exactitude. At the heart of the matter. When we ‘arrived’ there, it wasn’t a holy calmness we found: in the material world, the electron touched herself in perverse sensuality – neither here nor there, frolicking with virtualities, teasing the impossible, mocking our gaze; in the intellectual world, we surveyed the ancient ruins of Reason, overrun by visiting hordes from less austere realms; in the moral world, where we supposed ‘love’ to be the resolute bedrock for all things, we noticed a queer undergrowth, a flourishing carnality of considerations. Mere chaos.

In other words, we are finding that the heart of the matter is not a simple creed, stable ground, conquering Truth, or an exalted state. And that there is nothing ‘pure’ or finished about the world. The heart knows something we don’t – and this is that one and one often equals less; that life cannot be computed in terms of ends and purposes; that the idea that our lives are a lone feverish hunt for happiness is a conspiratorial compromise and, as such, what we all want and long for is not given or uncontested; and that behind the curtains, when the neon lights flicker out and our masks come off, when the candle-stained scripts rest exhausted from all the handling, our most astonishing fear is ourselves – strange, perverse, wild, indeterminate, and powerful. If we touched the heart of the matter, it wouldn’t be satisfaction we will feel. When the saints go marching in, it isn’t eternal rest they will find. Nothing is still or settled. The heart of the matter is a gasp, a bleeding cut, a haptic involution, a self-touching encounter, an event horizon that takes us in and belches us out in stranger versions of where we first began.

In a world where intentionality, agency, causality, learning and memory can no longer be safely ensconced away in the fleshy caverns of human be-ing – and at a time when modern civilization, our cherished binaries, our institutions, and our cultural lexicons are unfurling at their seams, grappling with resolute impasses and spinning black holes – I offer these dances with the preposterous. This website. This very material yearning for a world more at peace than the stories of infinite growth allow; a world more alive than can be accommodated in the anorexic confines of Newtonian imagination; a world more just than the exhausted binaries and tired clashes between ‘good’ and ‘evil’; a world where ‘I’ am home with Lali. With our daughter, Alethea. With the preposterous.

In the book, “Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude”, Adriana Cavarero makes the case that the old Western figure of man as upright in posture has moral and political significance. That is, she notices how this classical figuration of man as vertical and erect performs the imperatives of rectitude, and obscures the idea that we are …Continue Reading >>>

Imagine the universal scientist’s angst. He wants the alchemist’s gold…pure unvarnished knowledge of the world as it is. Untainted by bias, perspective, context or ground. Because to him knowledge is ideational, the free-floating reflection of the noumenal. Knowledge is distance, the privileged view from the luxury of dissociation. So he asks a question, and sets …Continue Reading >>>

I imagine that authenticity is not a goal, not a destination, but the journey of an ever ‘deepening’ hypocrisy meeting itself in the terror and peace of its vastness. To have arrived at being one’s ‘authentic self’ is to attempt to disentangle oneself from the flow and rush of things. It is to make painful …Continue Reading >>>

It’s time to turn squarely to time itself; it’s time to take time: for so long, most of the colonized world – including Africa – has been educated into the idea that there is only one time, and that this time stretches from an unsophisticated past to the glittering future, one which only the raptured …Continue Reading >>>